Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes Accuses Obama of Fomenting Hate

The Fox News chairman says the president pits blacks against whites, middle class against rich. Howard Kurtz on how Ailes undercut his largely positive message in a New Republic interview.

Roger Ailes says President Obama is whipping up hate. The Fox News chairman has never been a fan of the president, but even by his standards, those are strikingly harsh words.

“The president likes to divide people into groups,” Ailes tells The New Republic in an interview. “He’s too busy getting the middle class to hate rich people, blacks to hate whites. He is busy trying to get everybody to hate each other.”

He then added: “We need to get along.”

Ailes has a fondness for blunt language, and his point about Obama turning the middle class against the rich, albeit with the H word, echoes the standard conservative gripe about Democratic class warfare.

22. This is just standard operating procedure for the right wing.

Freudian slip: I almost wrote right whinge.

Glenn Beck said our biracial president, who speaks affectionately and respectfully of his white mother and grandparents, has a "deep-seated hatred for white people." Christian Coalition types borrow an image from the struggle for civil rights when they accuse people who support public schools but oppose voucher programs for private institutions of blocking the schoolhouse door.

It's beyond projection. It's a means of controlling the argument and influencing public opinion. These are the people who systematically attacked John Kerry's military honors and Al Gore's veracity. We know what Ailes and co. are capable of. We've seen and heard it for decades.